


Valence

by orphan_account



Series: Lies of Petrichor [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Doctor Who References, Double-Doctor, LOTS of Jack Harkness-ing, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:36:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was himself no longer. He was one of many, playing a game of strategy against a thousand of himself.<br/>With Jack at his side. That was the light in this black hole.<br/>It felt like the end of the world. Like the end of life.<br/>Like the end of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Valence

**Author's Note:**

> Be warned; the prelude is nothing but a tear-jerking, violent promise of what is to come.  
> This is the first time I've posted a Whovian fiction on this site, so I'm hoping for some beginner's luck that I'll finish this puppy-dog. The fact that I rated this 'mature' is mostly because of this little installment below.  
> Thanks and enjoy! 
> 
> DigiRez

"Hydrogen in our veins, it cannot hold itself, our blood is boiling.  
And the pressure in our bodies that echoes up above it is exploding.  
And our particles that burn it all because they aim for each other.  
And although we stick together, it seems that we are stranging one another."  
"The static of your arms, it is the catalyst.  
You're a chemical that burns-- there is nothing like this.  
It's the purest element, but it's so volatile,  
An equation heaven-sent, a drug for angels."  
\- Strangeness and Charm by Florence + The Machine

 

The electricity surged across his spine. Vertebrae popped, jaw thrown wide in a silent scream. Tendons stood against skin, purple-latticed with veins and pale with lack of blood. All around him and IN him; senseless light and NOISE. Such NOISE, thrumming against his skull (One, two... One, two, three, four).  
The NOISE of his own screaming, his own agony, his own wretched caterwauls of misery and anguish. The NOISE.  
And there were screams beside his own. Electricity, arcing along bodies that weren't his. Wrapping around hearts that he had no control over. The screams of dying souls and of innocent beings, tortured into the long reprieve of death.  
His back curved, head tossed and chin turned upwards to the sky. Knuckles cracked, tendons sizzled. His fingers stretched and turned into bent things like claws at his side. He began to cry-- barely able to stand, hearing others die... Dying himself. Tears hot as infernos spilled from bulging eyes, staining his smoking suit, washing the sorrow from his skin. Volts vaulted inside him, moving at the speed of light to eviscerate everything in him. Every scrap of conscious emotion and thought and dream and plea and wish and desire was extracted from him with malicious and vicious force-- that of a thousand suns, exploding against his mind at once. Every visage of strength was exterminated on the spot, more powerful than anything he had ever encountered. His breath was taken, wretched as his body wracked and quivered. Ashes filled his eyes like tears, cinders of the heart throbbing across his cheeks. Every flash again, of terror and agony and the burning, brazen untempered schism of time's desolation. The lack of compassion that the universe held-- it was cold and icy and so full of uncaring misery that it pulsating against the fabric of his life-force. It screamed to him, a drone of a scream that rampaged across him. In him, on him, all around him like an aura of death. A suffocating cloak of anguished EXISTING.  
Pain, pain, pain, everything is PAIN.  
Behind him. Behind him, or in front of him; somewhere close to his skin (he couldn't think clearly anymore, so consuming was his torture), something incoherent and primeval, such a sound filled with abject fear that it broke each of his hearts. Each one slowly withered and died, right there in the cavity of his chest, subjected by the sneering malignancy of the electricity. They caved in, refusing to beat alongside such a deafening sound. His body gave out, collapsed and writhing, concave, and he curled in on himself, useless, in quintessential misery, unable to do anything but drown in his own agony. But that monstrous noise still continued, pounding like bass and shrieking into his ears, shattering his hearts again and again. Warmth like blood covered him-- beseeching and beastly, drizzled across his neck, where it was infected by tongues of electricity. Bolts of lighting, tearing apart all of the atoms that made him.  
Into the agony he fell, accompanied by the immeasurable guilt that lied in the screaming of his hearts-- and the one life who occupied them, among so many dead souls. So fragile and broken and arched in electricity was this life. He occupied his mind, warping and twisting his sense of reality. The universe has shattered, again and again, but it doesn't seem to stop echoing in his mind, like Rose, like Donna-- the same sobbing wail of time and space and energy collapsing and COLLAPSING AND COLLAPSING.  
He hit the floor with eyes the size of moons-- orbiting cold and distant planets. They used to glow with knowledge unseen by any other living being in history, in innate nobility, glowed in grace. Every secret the universe had banished, every thought, every birth and death and love and loss and sacrifice and villainous act of treachery. Every feeling of pain. Every shred of anger. Every exaction of vengeance. They were his memories, all of them-- a thousand years worth of life, and countless millennia of crushing, burdening knowledge that no other living being could know. It rested, and it would die, with him. Now his eyes-- beautiful and sad and lost-- gleamed comatose; stale, in every shade of garden green and cloud grey and lucid nova blue and a thousand shattered fragments of soul, all entangling and disappearing in a fraction of a second. The entire universe, every dark crevice, gone. Gone in less than a second. Gone in less time than it took to realize. Tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, smearing the blood that blackened his skin. Tears for the fate of everything. Everything that had every been and once would have been.  
It felt like the end of the world. Like the end of life.  
Like the end of time.


End file.
